The Combinations, page 9
Hall a wreck but the rest standing firm, more or less, as far as appearances are
concerned). There’s a rationale in all this, an almost contrived senselessness
you’re barely able to grasp — the entropy of political stand-off, where everything
else is left in abeyance, crypto fascists under every rock, Stalinist double-dealers,
Opus Dei — camouflaged in plain view by the general dungheap mess the
POWs have been set to work cleaning up — it’ll be decades before the Fog of
42
War clears & even then… There’re other places, too, cities caught in the same
suspended animation, vivisectioned, just like this one — zones of chthonic
reterritorialisation, joined by an invisible meridian, telluric currents that flow
deep under Mitteleuropa, along an axis from Trieste to Berlin, disturbed only by
the last piece in the Nazi puzzle not falling into place. Golem City. It’s necessary
for the adepts of the new order to seek sanctuary elsewhere, under cover of the
Zone — to bide time, await the Resurrection.
@
Here, in the bowdlerised Ostmark capital — with its demi-Dietrich ennui &
untermonde-chic, its black markets & counterintrigue & bureaucratic miasma —
Hájek & his two merry muses eek-out whatever can be called under such
circumstances a living. Dignity has its price, but it isn’t very high. Things the
years will ameliorate & even banish from memory for now at least are bread &
butter on the table. Under cover of the university, Alma Mater Rudolphina,
Hájek advances his studies in the occult drama of human desire. Adept of the
crafts of procurement & supply, he begins charting a secret terrain within the
city, underground passageways, buried caches of those who’d died or fled or
made to disappear, hidden museums, archives, libraries, catacombs into which
the scrolls of the great bookkeepers had been smuggled during the deportations.
The university itself, with its front of respectability for a man who’s long
since ceased to sleep, lies on the Ringstrasse in the grey International Zone,
under the monthly rotated authority of the Four Powers: it’s a question of
keeping to the cracks, working the faultlines, buying, extorting or stealing when
necessary the documents that one-by-one will put them (Hájek & co.) finally
beyond reach of the Bolsheviks. Legal in all the most pejorative senses of the
word, certified non-collaborators, citizens in good standing, owners (on paper at
least) of several properties in the British Sector…
The whole city’s a stage for this little pantomime on its eight-year run (till
the allied occupation finally comes to an end & Hájek’s fortunes with it). Across
the Donau Kanal, the bombed-out Prater with its majestic ruin of a ferriswheel
surveys the ancient moribund city — Orson Welles, meanwhile, rehearsing the
infamous Third Man cuckoo-clock scene, faked in a London studio left
somehow unscathed during the Blitz. Who knows what could be taking place,
what plots being hatched, what conspiracy thwarted in the room next door, in
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the drains & sewers beneath your feet — that man or woman reading a
newspaper, stirring a cup of coffee, gripping a leather strap on the tram &
glancing towards you with enough ambiguity in the gesture to set your nerves on
edge — a zither playing inconspicuously in the background. Nothing’s what it
seems. Subsistence by constant deception…
They call me Harry Lime,
but I haven’t got a dime —
I just came from my own funeral,
the sermon was quite beautiful,
but as for the company
it had much to be desired…
While not very far away, in an obscure village on the Lüneburg Heath (at the
very time Hájek is leveraging a free pass) one Adolf Eichmann, chief technician
of the Final Solution, a.k.a. Otto Eckmann, is busy penning his memoirs in neat
tiny script on engineers’ quadrille paper, about to decamp for Rome & Bishop
Hudal, the Nazis’ Mr Fixit, thence — in the guise of one Ricardo Klemens (or
Clemens, as an Argentine immigration official will later record on his residency
visa), mechanic by trade — embarking on a forged Red Cross passport for
Buenos Aires & a smalltime job (the lowest of low-key) at the local Mercedes
Benz plant…
Blitz the highways in our new
four-door V Cambrio-Limousine,
with full-length foldaway canvas roof &
,cc of unbeatable horsepower!
Hájek — within a year of settling down in a large apartment on the Judenplatz,
presently enrolled for a degree in philology & earning more than his keep from
the black trade in antique books ( inter alia, etc.) — soon finds himself en route to
the Eternal City, following the trail of a piece of late medieval* arcanum called
the Voynich Manuscript. There were WANTED posters for Eichmann at all
the checkpoints, a grainy photograph of the ubiquitous Nazi in full regalia.
Hájek would later recall (while waiting at the Südbahnhof for the overnighter to
Rome) a balding, bespectacled man in a beige overcoat standing nearby at the
* Or early Renaissance? [:]
44
station kiosk, chewing a pretzel as he watched the entrances & exits, something
about him, strangely familiar but no more than that — a fleeting encounter which
adds nothing to what History would have us know or bid us deny.
In , after the ‘liberation’ of Schnitzelstadt from the Four Powers & as
atonement for his sins, the now Herr Doktor & ex-blackmarketeer, recent
author of Teatrum Mundi: Truth and Methods of Interpretation in Kircherian
Theosophy, is sent to eke-out his moral subsistence teaching History, socalled, to
snot-chugging schoolboys. First in Linz, then in Salzburg, & finally in some
lamentable suburb of Klagenfurt. By some coincidence, in each of these cities
the ever-industrious Dr Hájek makes important discoveries of illuminated
manuscripts previously thought lost, destroyed, looted during the war. Not even
the keenest expert eye suspects a thing.
‘Memory & Reason,’ the Herr Doktor gesticulates at a room of
nosepicking halfwits, ‘what good are they? Mankind’s délire de grandeur. To this
extent it’s true, we’re created in God’s own image. But is the death of God
therefore the tragedy we’ve been led to expect — hoped & prayed for — or
merely farce? Can we tell the image from its reflection? Of course, God — or so
we’re told by those expert in such things — is unbekannt, a stranger, unknown,
unfamiliar. Yet also obscure, unaware, ignorant — withdrawn from the world
like a tired old man. As in all things — History no less than Philosophy — truth
is often the contrary of what we wish for.’
comes & goes — annus mirabilis, annus horribilis.
‘Nothing changed. The same creature with a different face. Everyone who
went back, you know, they never got out again.’
Hájek watches patiently across the border as Cheskoslovnikia offers its
neck once more to the henchmen. In the meantime, a brief window of
opportunity. He’s searching for something, waiting for a sign, for some hidden
hand to show itself, reappear. Strange happenings. Rumours stirred by foreign
currencies. Books no-one has ever heard of coming to light after fourhundred
years & quietly vanishing again…
Elected a Privatdozent the year ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim was handed the
job of U.N. Secretary-General, Hájek returns with all due discretion to a
teaching post at his adopted Alma Mater, Univ. of Schnitzelstadt, having
recently published an annotated bibliography, thick as a telephone directory, of
the Carteggio Kircheriano ( Romani Collegii Societatis Jesu musaeum celeberrimum,
cujus magnum antiquariae rei, etc., etc. ). The subsequent years pass as uneventfully
as an eddy in a backwater. Then, with the Cold War on its last legs, Hájek
45
commences, for reasons far too je ne sais quoi ever to be stated in words, the
belaboured task of repatriation to his belovèd & much bereaved Golem City.
There once was a Prof called Tom Hájek,
who lived in a house that was play-egued.
One day he was snuffed,
while taking a bath,
now his ghost has no way of escay-ep.
Number 8 Jánský Vršek, in the fairytale district of Golem City, was a plain white
house & it was here that Professor Tomáš Hájek (Jnr.) resided before he died &
became a ghost. A coming-to-rest of sorts after the long peripatetic years of
exile. From the street, nothing too remarkable. Cross the threshold into the
courtyard, though, & an ancient astrological observatory stands atop a high
tower abutting the house’s northern wall.
The observatory — a bare platform with some shingling raised over it for
a roof — was sometimes referred to as Kelley’s Tower. This Tower had for
nearly four centuries served no higher function than that of a stairwell
connecting the upper & groundfloor apartments of the house, but it was true
that at one time it served a much grander design. Of the house, the Prof’s
apartment occupied the entire top floor: it opened from a narrow foyer off the
stairwell onto a parlour with a Petrov grand, a bureau, a winter garden, two
socalled garçonnières at either end reserved for the pair of muses who, faithful to
the last, had accompanied the Prof during the long Novembers of exile.
There was a very old photograph in a tarnished pewter frame on the Prof’s
writing desk. In it, a youthful Elsbeth von N____ stood on the Prof’s right, in a
black Grecian tunic, head nestling against his shoulder, hand draped in the
crook of his arm. Alžběta stood on his left, sheathed in white satin, jaw out-
thrust, one hand likewise draped, the fingers of the other entwined in a long
necklace. Their faces exhibited a curious symmetry, neither opposite nor
reversed, but rather contrary — as if illustrating some Pythagorean mysterium —
a pair of tutelary deities wrapped in obscure allegory & the Prof between them,
the divided soul, dark suit hanging from scarecrow shoulders, eyes fixed, gazing
full of purpose at the camera.
The apartment itself stood in a permanent First Republic gloom, littered
with decayed bric-à-brac. Dingy chandeliers, glassfronted cabinets with
mismatched crystal, skewed mirrors in oversized gilt frames, mantelpieces
crowded with porcelain kitsch, filigreed candelabra, bronze ashtrays, pendulum
46
clocks, carved obsidian heads, blue & green bottles, fleshy seashells, a battered
Viennese grandpiano in the corner, a plaster bust of Gaius Octavius in the
fireplace, & — in a stand behind the bureau door — a collection of ornate
walkingsticks, handles carved from poached ivory, yellow from wear. The Prof’s
private bureau opened from the end of a hallway that telescoped between
overladed shelves, books piled on the floor, filing cabinets & bundles of dusty
manuscript. In contrast, the bureau was a model of orderliness — only the
architecture betrayed any eccentricity: the windows were slanted left & right, the
parquet rose & fell in a single undulation, while a vaulted ceiling sloped to the
north so that the room itself appeared lopsided, each line contradicting every
other. It’d been that way for centuries.
[
Many many years before, the house at number Jánský Vršek came to be known
as the Donkey in the Cradle. The story went something like this…
Towards the end of the sixteenth century one of the astrological celebs
gracing the imperial court of Big Rudolf-with-the-double-digits-after-his-name
(number one in the number two business — known to dabble in the prima
materia himself from time-to-time — the socalled “alchemists’ friend”), a certain
Edwack Kelley no less, elected to take up residence there. Only a brief time
earlier, back in Old Blighty, this Kelley (K for short) lost his ears at the behest of
her Virgin Majesty — honi soit qui mal y pense — for having failed, very much to
his own immodest surprise, to deliver a promised Elixir of Life. Thereafter,
Magister K took to wearing his hair long, in an effort to keep this public
misfortune private.
At the house on Jánský Vršek, K’s living quarters were located in the attic
directly above the Prof’s apartment &, as the legend went, he was nightly to be
found in the sanctuary of his Ivory Tower charting the great firmament. During
this time a young widow with an infant found lodgings in a room on the ground
floor. When on one dark & stormy night her child fell gravely ill, the distraught
Frau ran out into the courtyard where she harkened upon a light emanating
from the Tower’s high window. Not knowing what else to do, she cried out —
‘Your Excellency, I beseech thee!’ she beseeched. ‘Please help! My poor little
Pinocchio’s dying!’
You’d think she’d’ve known better. The astrologer, disturbed by the
47
commotion below, leant out the Tower window &, as fortune would have it, at
that precise moment a windgust blew back his hair, exposing for all the world to
see a pair of mutilated earstubs. Furious, K screamed at the hapless woman —
‘Whore begone! Your whelp shall have the head of a mule!’
Mortified, the young mother rushed back inside, where she found her
child as she’d left him, lying in his cradle, but indeed the child’s head had
transformed into a mule’s. This poor afflicted Frau fretted in her room for three
days & nights, door locked & windows bolted, fearing the lunatic in the Tower
might attempt some further abomination. Then, on Christmas Eve, the
sometimes pious widow quietly snuck from the house & crossed the street to the
church of St Thomas.
Bawling, down on the raw of her knees before the statue of Our Lady,
beggaring belief for the sake of intercession, Ave Maria, gra… ple… do… te…
Virgo serena, pi… mu… et… imma… she lit a candle. In the chapel’s chiaroscuro
the Madonna’s lips trembled & she took it as a sign. Returning to her lodgings,
the anxious Frau fairly fainted-away at the sight now presenting itself. There in
its cradle, where only a moment past a braying monster lay, the all-too-human
phyzog of her little pipsqueak Pinochle peered from a bundle of humid
swaddling. The widow screeched. The babs smiled blithely at her heaving bub.
Seizing the moment, she snatched the child in her arms & shooed back to St
Tom’s to give thanks.
News of these events spread quickly throughout Golem City & it may
freely be assumed that in the days & weeks following, mother & infant acquired
a certain notoriety. What became of the widow’s uncertain. The Wunderkind,
falling into the clutches of one dubious impresario after another, came (it’s said)
to a sorry end, consumed by alcoholism, poverty & the clap. History, sometimes
just despite being arbitrary, nevertheless records that henceforth the alchemist’s
house on Jánský Vršek was known as U osla v kolébce…
They said, ‘Kid here’s your ticket,
the sky above’s no limit
and you’ll be the biggest star
this town has ever seen by far!
It’ll do your mother proud,
by Christ we’ll pull a monster crowd! ’
And they promised me the moon,
said we’d be there very soon,
at least within the hour
once I had my trousers down
48
for the gawkers in the front row
of some sleazy little freakshow peepshow!
‘Johnny Three-Legs! The Boy
with the Dong of a Donkey! ’
Oh, if you’d only seen me then,
it was almost three-foot-ten!
But I was just an ingénue,
I didn’t know what else to do —
so I slung it like a lasso
for the paying public to view.
I dangled it for a dollar
at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
and even primped it for the press
in a Little Orphan Annie dress.
I posed in crotchless Speedos
and a see-thru plastic tuxedo
while I signed my autograph
on a stack of Kodak photographs.
I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.
But still they screwed me in the arse
for every nickel, dime and cent —
while I could hardly make the rent.
Now I’m just another washed-up Bella,
like a stale old mortadella —
but if you’d seen me in my day,
